Celebrating Jo McCall
October 21st -23rd
Our partner in our UCW pilgrimage to Alabama will be honored in October
Our founder, Josephine Bolling McCall, turns 80 this year and we are inviting YOU to join our weekend of events celebrating in Montgomery, Alabama.
As the child of a Jim Crow South lynching victim speaking in America today, Jo is a national treasure who dedicates her life to addressing America’s history of lynching and the racial caste system that made it possible. Our weekend of tours and events is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet Jo and spend time with her and other history makers on the ground in Montgomery and Lowndes County, Alabama.
The weekend begins on Friday, October 21 with an opportunity to tour historic sites in Montgomery, including the EJI Memorial and Museum, the Mothers of Gynecology Memorial, during the day and a Gala celebration in the evening featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and MSNBC correspondent, Trymaine Lee, who wrote the chapter about the Bolling Family in The 1619 Project. Saturday and Sunday will include a special event honoring the Women of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC, who played a central role in expanding the Civil Rights movement throughout the South in the 1960s, and a tour of Lowndes County, offered exclusively by The Elmore Bolling Initiative, to make a pilgrimage to the county where Elmore and Bertha Mae Bolling raised their family and built a network of farming and transport businesses that lifted up Black people with jobs and services, and where Ku Klux Klan members lynched Elmore in 1947. We will also visit important sites in the fight for voting rights in ‘Bloody Lowndes.” Elmore Bolling’s daughter and Lowndes County native, Jo McCall will lead along with renowned local tour leader, Michelle Browder, one of USA Today’s Women of the Year.
We are celebrating Jo for her dedication to truth-telling in the place where her father, Elmore Bolling, was lynched in 1947, and also for being a community leader (like her father) who empowers citizens in Lowndes County. Reserve your place at the gala and our other special events here.
Whether you will be attending our celebration or not, please support The Elmore Bolling Initiative with a donation or sponsorship.